Barry Manilow Brings His Greatest Hits Show To Mohegan

May 09, 2013|By OWEN MCNALLY, Special To The Courant, The Hartford Courant

As Barry Manilow approaches 70, a milestone for anybody but especially for showbiz superstars, the singer/songwriter, who's sold more than 80 million records worldwide, is as passionate about his music as ever.

And without a doubt, this apparently forever young performer, who says he never really wanted be a singer but only an arranger and a songwriter, retains one of his great but perhaps most sorely underestimated talents: his quick sense of humor.

Manilow, who recently did a telephone interview with The Courant to promote his latest touring show, which plays Friday, May 10, at 8 p.m. at Mohegan Sun Arena, was even funny when faking shock and outrage when I confessed to him that I've never seen one of his fabled, live, in-concert performances.

"You've never seen my show!" he says with facetiously withering incredulity, lightly seasoned with mock shock and faux awe.

"You've only seen me on YouTube, and you're in Hartford! I've been there a million times, and you've never seen my show!" he says in a tone righteously rising to a subtly scathing ironic crescendo.

Next comes a slight pause worthy of a master of comic timing like George Burns. Then comes the zinger:

"What are you, 12 years old!"

Again a Burns-like pause:

"And now you're asking me if I do patter between songs?" again with his carefully calibrated fiery ire rising to exactly pitch-perfect comic effect.

Then again, after another Burns-like pause, comes yet another deathlike, mano a Manilow zinger.

"What do you think? I sit at the piano and play 'Mandy' all night long!"

If you've ever read Manilow's 1987 memoir, "Sweet Life: Adventures on the Way to Paradise" — a warm, sometimes amusing chronicle of a poor kid from Brooklyn laboring away obscurely in the CBS mail room who, almost reluctantly, skyrockets to stupendous superstardom — you know that his patter, whether on the page, on the stage or on the phone is leavened with humor. Self-deprecating, not vituperative, it's a bit reminiscent of Woody Allen's, but without Woody's intellectual allusions to God, existentialism and the metaphysical meaning of life and death.

Recalling his poor, rundown boyhood neighborhood in Flatbush, for example, Manilow, the memoirist, writes: "The only time a limousine made an appearance there was when somebody died."

Or when asked in his memoir in an imaginary interview with himself if there are rules to follow in order to write a hit song, Manilow replies: "Yes. There are three very important rules to writing a hit song. But nobody knows what they are."

Humor has been Manilow's shield over the decades against the slings and arrows of critics. They've savaged him mercilessly while, much like Liberace, yet another lifetime piñata for critics, Manilow, blessed with his pop music Midas touch, has laughed all the way to the bank.

Asked about the source of his Woody Allen-like, self-chiding sense of humor, Manilow wryly replies:

"Well, we all come from Booklyn where you need a sense of humor to get by. Mel Brooks went to my high school. So there you are. That explains it," he says.

While humor is a recurring feature in his concerts, Manilow's Mohegan Sun show, instead of being rooted in promoting the concept of his latest album as in past tours, caters to an audience that "really wants to hear the songs that they know."

"As I grow into my hundreds — I'm a hundred years old already and I'm still working," he jokes, "I know that audiences have come to hear the songs that either they grew up with, or their parents played, or they fell in love with recently.

"I stick in some of my album cuts and, you know, they're really polite. They indulge me. And then I do 'Ready to Take a Chance Again,' and the roof caves in. So, I know what they're looking for. I know what they want. And I'm happy to do it," he says.

"I'm one of the lucky guys. I can actually do 90-minutes on stage, and every song I do is something that they (audience members) know. I don't know how many people can say that. I've got this incredible catalog of well-known songs so that I can actually do a full show, and every song is something that the audience knows. So that's what I'm doing these days, and that's what this show really is about," he says.

Even now almost three decades after his then rather premature memoir was published, Manilow is still somewhat mystified by his enormous success, still pondering how fame came his way and its enormous, sometimes dizzying impact on his life.

"It's astounding," he says, still sounding a bit like the musically talented, piano-playing, song-addicted musician (accordion was his first instrument), insecure teenager from Flatbush.

"I am still amazed. They told me in the beginning that, if you're lucky, a pop career lasts for five years, and I believed them. But after all these years, I'm still here. I give all the credit to the audiences, of course.